".
. .O'Brien, too, is a man with a
plan; his way of entrusting the
story to real people gives [his movies]
surprising depths. We do not get a sugared
take on pastoral virtues; we get living
people -- cranky, odd, sad, generous --
co-creating a cinema in which real American
lives breathe through the pores of the narrative.
This quietly revolutionary moviemaking is
never sentimental; there's a sharp, life-weathered
Vermont tang to the life we see... In the
early days of movies, filmmakers like D.W.Griffith
and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd took
their cameras out into the fresh American
countryside. O'Brien is bringing their kind
of oxygen back into narrative, fictional
cinema.